General descriptive studies (00350): We used the National Cancer Institutes SEER incidence data to investigate age, period, and cohort effects on bone cancer incidence by histological type, finding that osteosarcoma rates decreased among those aged over 60 years, perhaps related to diminished exposure over time to bone-seeking radionuclides. In contrast, chondrosarcoma rates among females ages 20-69 years rose by about 50%, corresponding to cohorts born during 1935-1975 with subsequent rising exposures to oral contraceptives and menopausal hormonal therapy. An analysis of SEER data revealed a significant left-sided excess of melanoma skin cancer among males that was less pronounced among females, consistent with the hypothesis that UV exposure while driving may increase risk. Multiple myeloma (MM) is the most common hematologic malignancy in blacks. Some prior studies suggest inferior survival in blacks while others suggest similar survival. Using the SEER database, we analyzed 5798 black and 28 939 white myeloma patients. Results showed that disease specific and relative survival rates were higher in blacks than whites, but survival improvements were less for blacks than whites over time. African American men have among the highest prostate cancer incidence rates in the world. We compared US rates with those among black men in sub-Saharan Africa and found that the latter were considerably lower, were increasing over time, and have been comparable to those for distant stage in African Americans, likely due to differences in medical care access, screening, registry quality, genetic diversity, and Westernization. Breast cancer is a chronic and heterogeneous disease that may recur many years after initial diagnosis and treatment. This has important implications for the practicing oncologist. For instance, an early effect of adjuvant (or postoperative) treatment may diminish over time or, alternatively, there may be a lag time before some treatment effects become pronounced. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that commonly used adjuvant hormonal and chemotherapies may have main and minor effects soon or later after initial breast cancer diagnosis, respectively. Therefore, the elucidation of the time-dependent effects of adjuvant therapy will become increasingly important in the future as the number of long-term breast cancer survivors continues to increase. The U.S. Military and general populations may differ in the exposure to sunlight and other risk factors for melanoma and therefore the incidence rates of melanoma may be different in these two populations. However, few studies have compared melanoma incidence rates and trends over time between the military and the general population. We compared data from the Department of Defense Automated Central and SEER. Results showed that melanoma rates overall were significantly lower in the military than in the general US population. Age-specific analyses of non-cardia gastric cancer incidence reveal divergent trends among US whites: rates are declining in individuals aged 40 years and older but rising in younger persons. To investigate this heterogeneity further, incidence trends were evaluated by anatomical subsite using SEER and the US Centers for Disease Control and Preventions National Program of Cancer Registries. Long- and short-term incidence trends for gastric cancers showed a shifting distribution by anatomical subsite suggesting that corpus (or body) cancers of the stomach may have distinctive etiology. Human papillomavirus (HPV) related and unrelated oral squamous cell carcinomas develop at younger ages than HPV unrelated tumors and have increased over time. These observations intimate a major emerging role for HPV infection in the epidemiology of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas, especially among men. If current trends continue, the annual number of HPV related oral squamous cell carcinomas among men is expected to surpass the number of cervical cancers by 2020. These observations have important policy implications pertaining to HPV vaccination of boys in the U.S. Historically, the relationships between epidemiological variables and estrogen receptor (ER) expression were not clearly defined for breast cancer. Some investigators suggested that all breast cancers were initially ER positive, but subsequently progressed to ER negative through clonal evolution. However, if ER positive expression was simply an early stage of ER negative breast cancer, it seemed counterintuitive for ER positive cancers to increase with advancing age in population-based tumor registries such as SEER;i.e., ER positive cancer populations should be younger (not older) than ER negative populations. Alternatively, breast cancer overall reflect the superimposition of 2 main types according to ER expression. Additionally, after correcting for missing or unknown ER data in the SEER database, heterogeneous secular trends were observed by ER expression with rising ER positive and falling ER negative incidence rates. If current trends continue, ER positive cancers are projected to increase another 5% and ER negative cancers are projected to decrease another 11% by 2016. Histological type-specific thyroid cancer incidence rates were found to vary by racial/ethnic group, gender, and age. In contrast to age-specific rates of papillary thyroid cancer that peaked in midlife, especially among women, rates for follicular, medullary, and anaplastic types continued to rise across virtually the entire age range, especially for anaplastic carcinomas. Female-to-male incidence rate ratios among whites decreased with age most steeply for the follicular type and least steeply for the medullary type. A comparison of Burkitt lymphoma (BL) and non-BL non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) incidence among persons in a US cohort of HIV/AIDS found that the BL rates were trimodal with peaks at pediatric, adult, and geriatric ages, in contrast to non-BL NHL rates that rose from childhood to the adult years and remained fairly constant thereafter;the BL rates generally declined with decreasing CD4 lymphocyte count whereas those for non-BL NHL rose. Previous research has noted higher cancer mortality rates and lower survival among males than females. However, systematic comparisons of these two metrics by sex have been limited. We extracted U.S. vital rates and survival data from the SEER program for 36 cancers by sex. In general, the Male-to-female mortality rate ratios were markedly elevated while the corresponding cancer survival disparities were much less pronounced. This suggests that sex-related cancer disparities are more strongly related to etiology than prognosis.et of breast cancer tissue microarrays (TMAs). Our 2nd SEER RTR will build TMAs for nearly 800 ovarian epithelial cancers (OEC). We will: 1) Assess whether tissue expression of certain molecular markers (Ki-67, P16, and P53) modify the effect of tumor grade on incidence and/or survival, and 2) Perform exploratory molecular studies to include protein and gene expression, methylation profiling, mismatch repair analysis, and tissue telomeres. Mortality Rate Generator Software (00390): The online version of the Atlas of Cancer Mortality in the United States, 1950-94, published in 1999, has been updated to include data through 2004 and is publicly available at (http://parsley.cit.nih.gov/ratecalc). Users can create customized maps according to cancer, age groups, sex, and race. US Military Cancer Institute (USMCI)/NCI Collaborative Research Program (10382): DCEG and USMCI researchers are analyzing data on more than 9 million active and retired military personnel and their families to estimate cancer rates as well as study the effects of occupational exposures and lifestyle factors on cancer risk.